Agency
“Will” is out. We don’t like “will” anymore. It’s too pure, too peremptory, the province of gods and their imitators: divine will, the will to power, etcetera. We prefer instead the more gently cadenced “agency,” a word which better captures our anxiety about who’s really in control, with its hint that we’re always acting as someone else’s agent, even when that someone is ourselves. Although maybe this anxiety is just a front: he admitted to me that his favorite part of arranging a threesome was not the sexual act itself, but rather the freedom to solicit the third person under the guise of acting as his partner’s factotum, the luxury to dress his desire in quotation marks. That’s what prophets have always done.
First: I was talking to a writer about why many writers, contrary to my every Romantic notion, were polished socialites who suavely guarded their private emotions. He told me it was because they feared being written about, which struck me as odd: after all, what better proof for a member of the attention-seeking tribe that someone was, in fact, paying attention? Four years later I was living in the desert when a friend alerted me that my ex had written an essay possibly touching on our breakup, which was as much as could be deduced from the short snippet she’d posted online. What made my ensuing freakout funnier was that this essay was published in an obscure print-only magazine focused on weed culture, so I had to beg distant coastal friends to scour recondite bookstores and high-brow dispensaries in the hopes of securing the accursed periodical, which in my weaker moments late at night took on the aspect of a grimoire—it felt as though the moment it were opened a more louche, more loserish clone of me would slither out onto the streets of Bushwick to live a much dumber life than the one I’d planned, and he had to be cement-shoed into Sheepshead Bay forthwith. It was only months later that someone actually chanced upon a copy, by which time my fever had burned through itself. By which time I could simply be disappointed that there wasn’t much in there about me at all. And outside my window, nothing but desert.
Do the broken-hearted have agency? Yes, in the same way that the drowning do. He thrashed his arms around in an ocean of her, her in every direction, her for miles, grasping for anything solid. And meanwhile what could she say to help? Any word she offered him would just be more water. It’s a painful analogy, and also not an entirely accurate one: even from where we stood on the shore with our binoculars, we could see that the water wasn’t that deep. “Just stand up!” we shouted, watching him kick and twist against the placid surface. Unfortunately, it feels more noble to imagine you’re fighting against something that can destroy you than to walk among your friends stripped and dripping.
In Antonioni’s The Passenger, David Locke assumes the life and identity of a man he finds dead in a neighboring hotel room, taking the man’s passport, plane tickets, and appointment book, a ghost shadowing another ghost’s itinerary. It’s a curious sort of freedom, submissiveness ad absurdum, appealing for how it suggests that we’re most ourselves when we have no idea who we are, but ultimately futile because, like Locke, we can only hide from that knowledge for so long. Fortuna’s rollcall is strict, her agents ubiquitous.
She admitted that she wouldn’t like it if her boyfriend, a freelance ends-meeter like her and a musician by calling, laid down a strict schedule for when he needed time for himself to practice. I misunderstood: so you couldn’t be with someone who had worked nine-to-five? No, it would be different if someone forced him into that schedule—the point was that he alone would be saying: these are the times that you can’t share with me. And it makes sense, forgiving people more easily for the things they don’t want to do, but in my bitter moments I wonder if it isn’t also the fastest way to turn them into extenuators and cowards.
At the Airbnb where he was staying the kindly senescent hosts made chit-chat as they explained the locks and pointed out the towels. As it happened, a late-arriving friend of his would be staying in the neighboring cottage, and he knew this friend couldn’t abide small-talk; she never knew what to say. He asked the hosts: when checking her in, could they just stick to the basics, avoid the patter? Sure, sure. And yet, when he saw his friend, he was surprised to hear that this seemingly thoughtful and gracious couple had subjected her to the same banalities. Shocked, in fact. But why shouldn’t refraining from small talk be as difficult for one person as engaging in it is for another? We may nod sagely at poetic homilies about how the unbearable vanity of the West privileges being over non-being, but to the end we’ll never admit that action and stasis move through us just the same, here and gone. A tide flows as easily as it ebbs. Stomp your soaked shoes all you want, it’s not the water’s fault that the tyrant moon can’t hear your curses.